Interactional Linguistics - Online First

This conversation-analytic study takes as its focus one kind of adjacency pair, comprising a first pair-part that is a tentatively (i.e., provisionally and/or approximately) formulated questioning turn, and a second pair-part that supplies an answer (or sometimes a non-answer response). Such tentative questioning turns, through a range of turn design features, are routinely built to (1) relax the expectations for any particular mentioned candidate answer to be confirmed by the answerer, (2) display difficulties with finding an optimal wording of the question, (3) treat the prospective answerer as better placed for setting the terms in which the answer will be framed, and (4) defer to the prospective answerer some rights to shape the topic and/or action agenda. Qualitative and quantitative evidence is provided showing that answerers orient to this tentativeness by usually beginning to answer in overlap with the questioning turn. The answers themselves also attest that TQTs set only loose constraints for the response turn.

This article explores resources for multimodally aligning with projected continuation in data from Peninsular Spanish, engaging with method-ological-theoretical frameworks from Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. The article presents a pattern largely representative of a collection of fifteen storytellings: When tellers project continuation (pragmatically, semantically, prosodically, syntactically, gesturally), recipients are silent and embodiedly still, steadily gazing at teller, rarely producing vocal continuers. The Aforementioned recipient behavior appears throughout the data as structurally aligning with the turn-taking system being adjusted to one speaker doing a lengthy turn-at-talk. As pertaining to vocal continuers, the pattern is also representative of a pool of >364 big packages from which the storytellings are collected. One of the rare occasions when vocal continuers are employed in the data from Peninsular Spanish, is in a multimodally restricted participation framework. This study thus invites a multimodal reinterrogation of the roles and frequencies of vocal continuers in the interactional achievement of multi-unit-turns. Alongside work on other languages, however, it also suggests that structural alignment, as a likely universal relational principle, can be language-/culture-specifically routinized.

This article examines the use of excuse me as a practice for invoking the complainability of another person’s conduct in the service of sanctioning it as misconduct. It explores how a form that semantically expresses its speaker’s desire to be excused (excuse me ) can be used to flag another person’s doings as transgressive or untoward. It is proposed that, to elucidate this puzzle, it is necessary to adopt a more holistic perspective and to incorporate other uses of the format (e.g., in other-initiated repair, as an attention-drawing device), as well as possible relationships between them, into the analysis. The paper offers a sketch of such a more holistic, integrative account. This account revolves around the idea that practices of speaking that mobilize similar or even the same linguistic resources implicate partially overlapping sets of affordances for action which link different usages together in a larger pragmatic landscape. As such, form-based practices of speaking and the various actions they can implement exhibit demonstrable relationships across different domains of use which may need to be taken into account when thinking about a practice’s fit to the action it implements. One of the key benefits of such an approach is that it allows for mapping out larger pragmatic landscapes and to move beyond the isolated description of individual practices of speaking.